Just to clear up Power Girl, she was retconned as a descendant of  Arion of Atlantis, not Orion of the New Gods.(Although that would have been a lot more interesting!).

I think "the rule" was part of the compartmentalization we fans partake in. Writers were more inclined to use a character because they liked them. Heck, the Earth 1 Vigilante actually appears before we even know there is an Earth 2 version.

Of course, even his stories that were only supposed to involve Earth-1 took some liberties. I used to wonder if Haney and Bob Kanigher got along, simply because Haney's use of 'old' Sergeant Rock in team-ups with Batman seemed like a big 'so what?' to Kanigher's strict insistence that Rock did not survive World War II.

Mike -- I always thought it was supposed to be a rule. When it became clear that a few superheroes with powers -- not even magical powers like Sargon, but "scientific" powers -- had appeared on Earth-One before Superboy, that made for an awkward revelation. I'm thinking of Air Wave and Commander Steel in particular. (The latter wasn't even a character who who'd really been around in the 1940s! He was created in the 1970s!)

Of course, Roy Thomas, being Roy Thomas, provided an explanation as to how characters from Earth-Two "moved" to Earth-One in the pages of ALL-STAR SQUADRON, right before the ending of CRISIS made the explanation totally moot.

I still don't think the "singleverse" was necessarily a bad idea but it did make for what some readers latter called "Earth-Clutter" -- i.e., too many super-people on one Earth. Captain Marvel and the Marvel Family, in particular, never really fit in with the JLA, Titans, etc. no matter what anyone did. I think they should've been moved to their own, whimsical world and title, aimed specifically at kids (not teens, kids), where they would never cross over with the mainstream DC Universe.

Or the ending of CRISIS could've left us with a multiverse slightly different than the one before CRISIS. That would've been OK too.

I find it hard to believe that any of the present editors at Marvel and DC are any kind of "fanboys"--good or bad.  Same thing for most of the big name writers.  The impression I get is that they barely know the characters and most of "the old stuff" can be thrown out the window.  They're all trying to one-up each other on how to make their mags "cool" and how they can make "boring old do-gooders" edgy by making them a secret Nazi, a sex freak, or maybe finally killing their unarmed arch enemy.

Perhaps I'm wrong.  At least with the old "fans turned pros," you often knew them from the letters pages, and then we knew the good editors because they were good writers first.  With the absence of letters pages these days, and no freelancers ever seeming to "graduate" to editorial anymore, who knows where the new crop of editors comes from?

And it's really hard to complain about writers like Roy Thomas, Len Wein, Steve Gerber, etc. starting as fans--at least they were fans of people like Stan Lee, Ditko, and Kirby.  If today's younger editors ARE "fanboys," I fear that they were raised on horrible 90's Image and Image rip-offs or quirky amateurish Indie comics.

As far as today's artists go, many range from being early 90's Image rip-offs to bland and boring IMO. Very little storytelling in that type of art with a lot of talking heads.

Adding to Stephen's thought about editors...DC seems to have better editors right now because they come across as more professional. Marvel's editors seem like (based on interviews and letters pages) kids who grew up watching the X-Men cartoon and are just happy to be working with Brian Michael Bendis.

I wonder if the annual crossover events of Marvel and DC come from a subconscious urge by editors to make sure the events of all their books are set to a "Greenwich Mean Time", and thus preserve continuity. 

***

This is NOT a criticism of Brian's words, but an example of how fucked up it all is.

I get "civilians" asking me questions, i.e. a lapsed comic fan I've mentioned before. He asked me recently why there are TWO Superman in the current, post-Rebirth comics. I have no idea!

I also want to talk about another domino: DC VS MARVEL. Correct me if I'm wrong, but prior to that, the heroes all lived on a shared earth. It was cool. I was in awe of the Superman/Spider-Man crossover, it was exciting to know that they lived on the same earth; and when I revisited Lee/Ditko Spider-Man tales, or 1970s Superman stories, I thought about how they were all inhabiting the same reality. I even said to a friend, a few years ago, that when I was reading the Lee/Ditko Spider-Man tales, I thought about how, just a few hundred miles away, Superman was in the prime of his career whilst the web-slinger was starting out.

DC VS MARVEL, whilst enjoyable in some ways, did away with that. That, along with other crossovers, has often featured a LOT of semantics, i.e. how do we set up the fact these two universes will combine? That sucks the fun out of it; I prefer the idea of Superman simply flying to New York or Batman mentioning that he had always had a file on the Hulk in his Batcave!

"For me, Crisis was a gift."

I agree with this. Prior to Crisis, which came out when I was around 9 or 10, I was collecting only a few DC titles (Flash, Firestorm, New Teen Titans) and the odd issues here and there of Superman, Batman, etc. For a kid justdipping their toes into the DC universe, the whole thing with the multiple versions of the characters and multiple Earths, imaginary stories, etc., it was all a bit daunting. What Crisis did was streamline things, expose me to other characters and books I wasn't familiar with and set things up for a more cohesive line. The problems that arose weren't the fault of Crisis itself but rather the post Crisis handling of the DC line. Some books got a hard reboot, some a soft reboot and others didn't seem affected at all. If the editorial staff had given the creative teams more clearly defined terms for which to handle the outcome of the event, it might have flowed better and not required Zero Hour to fix a few of the problems that cropped up over the years as a result.

As a reader, I still enjoy Crisis and appreciate what they were trying to do with it.